The Intertextuality of the Kragehul Spear-shaft Inscription

Abstract

The inscription on a spear-shaft excavated from the Kragehul bog, just outside Flemløse, Denmark, in the late nineteenth century, is one of the most interpretatively problematic of all the early runic texts. Previous treatments of the inscription, however, have failed to consider the intertextuality and syntax of the text properly, and have often been distracted by idiosyncratic hypotheses peculiar to runic studies. The present paper addresses several of the shortcomings evident in the philological method applied in previous accounts in a historiographically critical analysis of the very difficult ancient moor find. Syntactic features such as anastrophe and left branch extraction can be discerned in the Kragehul spear-shaft inscription that seems to preserve a text that is intertextually paralleled by other contemporary Migration Age sources.